I was there for two months during which time we had two major typhoons. You don't go out in a typhoon, believe me. I had to cross a courtyard during the eye of the storm (too long a story) and it was one of the most eerie feelings, no rain, no wind, no noise.
So what do you do when you know you are going to be stuck in your apartment for two days and you don't want to watch the rain being driven through the concrete walls? You have an embroidery party. Well my mother and her friend did. They showed me how to do what became known in our family as "Australian Cross-stitch" because her friend was Australian. I'm sure it has a dozen other names. Before then, my talents had been limited to sewing on buttons and badges at my boarding school. The gingham table cloth below was my first real attempt at embroidery. It wasn't perfect, in some places it wasn't even good, but it was fun - in a tedious, mind calming way. I still have the table cloth, it's old, it has inherited a number of stains that will never come out, but although I wasn't hooked yet it just needed someone to cast the fly and reel me in.
Not that I spent all my time stitching. It was Hong Kong, it was the early 1970's, I was fresh from incarceration from the age of nine in an all male boarding school and I knew nothing. I sort of even knew that I knew nothing.
I did the tourist things, I went to the tourist spots and climbed The Peak, I crossed on the Star Ferry and went to the border with China. And I discovered that girls were different! The only women in my life until then had been mother, aunts and grannies. Girls were definitely DIFFERENT.
In USA it is called chicken scratch.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing this with me, it's always good to know what stitches are called in different places.
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